From the trees on the island, they constructed two small pinnaces of cedar, and loaded them with abundant supplies of salt pork, live turtles, salted birds and fish, which were part of the island’s natural produce. Governor Nathaniel Butler, about 1622.In our paving over of paradise and overfishing the seas, it is difficult to imagine the Bermuda that lay in glorious harmony in the middle of the western North Atlantic until the early 1500s, unknown to any living person. After Juan de Bermudez happened upon the place in late 1505, while on his way home to Spain after a period in the Caribbean, a Pandora’s box of eco-changing agents was unleashed on that earthly paradise, including the worst of them all, members of the Homo Sapiens species of mammals. Probably before any humans set foot on Bermuda, European boars were let loose on the bigger islands, there to provide food for shipwrecked Spanish mariners, though sailors of other countries of the Old World eventually experienced a forced sojourn and pork on the isolated archipelago in the middle of a watery nowhere. The swine would have made quick work of any ground-laying birds and what they did not destroy by default, people eventually slaughtered, mostly to extinction.It was onto those islands, subjected to almost a century of human interference, that Sir George Somers and the 150-strong complement of the wrecked Sea Venture were unceremoniously dumped in late July 1609, having evaded certain death by the propitious appearance of Bermuda, as a ship-destroying hurricane suddenly abated. The eight other vessels of the supply fleet destined for the English colony at what became Jamestown rode out the storm and arrived on the eastern coast of North America in relatively good order, including the small vessel, Virginia, the first British vessel built in this hemisphere at the Northern Colony of Virginia in late 1607. It would nine months before the James Fort settlers, and indeed, interested parties in England, would hear of the survival of Sir George, ‘Admiral’ of the supply fleet, and the others who sailed on the Sea Venture. The miraculous saving of those souls and their adventure at the ‘Isle of Devils’ would inspire Shakespeare in the writing of his last play, ‘The Tempest’, in late 1610.Back on the beach, Sir George and the waterlogged complement of the Sea Venture settled in for what would prove to be a long visit to the apparently inhospitable Bermudas. Like the Grand and Georges Banks, the waters of the island would have abounded in life, fish aplenty, turtles, conchies and lobsters. On land, the Spanish swine had multiplied and had created highways through the cedar and palmetto forests that decked most of the land, crosswise to dinners of cahow and ‘egg-bird’ nests and berries from the palms and fruit of the ‘prickly pear’ cactus. It was a great time, until George and Co decided to add pigs to their palettes; now the only boars of that variety left hereabout are on one of the out-islands off the coast of Georgia. Aside from victuals for the immediate kettle, the shipwrecked people salted the pork in anticipation of their onward journey to Virginia.Meanwhile, on the mainland at James Fort, life was less than salubrious, much less a paradise in comparison with Bermuda, between attacks from the understandable hostile natives and periods of starvation and illness. While the James River must have had a fish or two, as well as other edible life, the people of the fragile settlement seemed incapable of adapting to the new land, so different from their own homes and landscapes in England. Dozens died at Jamestown, while at Bermuda but a couple died, as did the firstborn Bermudian, a girl, or were murdered as happened with one European and possibly a missing Native American, returning home from Britain.Finally, the day of departure arrived and the Bermuda cedar-built boats, Patience and Deliverance, set sail towards the setting sun and the Virginia coast, with loads of food and some 130 souls, 14 have disappeared the previous year when they attempted to reach ‘civilisation’ in the pinnace of the Sea Venture. Covering the 700-odd miles to Jame Fort, Sir George found the settlers in dire straits and in a couple of days, after consuming the groceries from Bermuda, it was decided to return to England and all set out for the open sea, only to meet a supply fleet under the command of Lord Delaware. A return to the colony was ordered and the rest, they thought, was history, the boars from Bermuda perhaps responsible for saving the beginning of the United States of America.All was thought to be history and that James Fort had vanished into oblivion into the James River, taking with it all and any evidence of the Bermuda connection of May 1610. Thus it was until some 20 years ago when archaeologists, under the leadership of Dr William Kelso, discovered that only a portion of the Fort had been claimed by the native waters of the James. Under the auspices of what is now ‘Preservation Virgina’, archaeological excavations have taken place for most of the intervening period, with extraordinary results of structures and artefacts relating to the early history of Jamestown, when it was but a small fort of timber palisading.Among the thousands of artefacts that have been recovered are some that could only have arrived at James Fort in May 1610 from the island of Bermuda. While the Euro-boars cannot be so distinguished, bones of the Cahow, conch and other shells not found in Virginia waters and lumps of Bermuda limestone are proof positive of the saving voyage and the arrival of Sir George Somers and cargo from the island. For dating purposes, those Bermudian objects are as good a form of evidence at James Fort as any coin of the English Realm, for the Cahow bones, in particular, would have been discarded as soon as the meat was consumed, shortly after Somers moored his two little ships in the James River.Thus archaeology has provided further evidence for the first links between Jamestown and Bermuda, the first and second permanent English colonies in the Americas (1607 and 1612). Sent back to the island to bring home some more bacon to Virginia, Sir George ironically died in Bermuda in late 1610 from ‘a surfeit of pork’, the revenge of the boars, you might say.Dr Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.